Lás­zló Nemes: ​‘I’m try­ing to push the bound­aries of film language’

Lás­zló Nemes has a boy­ish­ness at odds with the hell­ish and con­fronta­tion­al nature of his two fea­ture films. Sun­set is the fol­low up to the film that in 2015 announced Nemes on the world stage as the youngest direc­tor to pre­mière in com­pe­ti­tion in Cannes. The Auschwitz-set Son of Saul involved being locked into a cam­era angle that mim­ic­ked the point-of-view of its lead actor, result­ing in a feel­ing of immer­sion in chaos with­out recourse to the relief of an overview.

Sun­set uses the same tech­nique this time to fol­low a young woman in Budapest in 1913 as she dogged­ly pur­sues the mys­tery of her par­ents’ death on the cusp of World War One. We dived in at the deep end with Nemes – for whom bursts of elo­quent feel­ing seem con­tin­u­al­ly close to sur­face – and talked about destruc­tive human­i­ty, the log­ic behind his point-of-view tech­nique, his objec­tions to cur­rent trends in cin­e­ma and tech­nol­o­gy, and his grand­moth­er Klara.

LWLies: Both your films are very dark. Where does your bleak world­view come from?

Nemes: I guess that’s my cen­tral Euro­pean way of look­ing at things. Are there many rea­sons not to see the world as bleak? The 20^th cen­tu­ry was very inter­est­ing and mys­te­ri­ous because it start­ed as a very promis­ing age and in a mat­ter of a few years we turned a promise into a night­mare. I’m real­ly inter­est­ed in how much destruc­tion there is at the height of civil­i­sa­tion, and how the human soul can be linked to the soul of civil­i­sa­tion, and what forces are at work.

Do you have any insights into what it is about human­i­ty that caused us to nosedive?

There’s a cen­tral mys­tery to the fall of civil­i­sa­tions. Rome wasn’t destroyed by the Bar­bar­ians, Rome was destroyed from with­in. In a way, our civil­i­sa­tion was also destroyed because the promise and the sophis­ti­ca­tion, and the illu­sion of good­ness was proud­ly, in a very inti­mate way, linked to a will­ing­ness to self-destroy. The forces of con­struc­tion and the forces of the down­fall can­not be separated.

It’s clear how one can look at bleak polit­i­cal out­comes and wars and to feel despair but in Sun­set the betray­als and the vio­lence feel much more inter­per­son­al. Is that how you think things are between people?

Well, did you ever read Kaf­ka? There’s a con­stant obsta­cle for human beings to deci­pher and under­stand the world that’s around us. I’m inter­est­ed in how much cin­e­ma nowa­days, espe­cial­ly in the last 30 years, has com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the audi­ence – the inter­net is still doing it and the tele­vi­sion is doing it – how much con­trol we have on our world, how much under­stand­ing we have of our world. There’s this almost nar­cis­sis­tic opti­mism in that. But I feel, on the con­trary, that we are fail­ing to mea­sure our lim­i­ta­tions and the fact that we can­not have a god-like point of view on the world.

Cin­e­ma today – by jump­ing from angles, from points of view, always giv­ing the right amount of infor­ma­tion and the right vision when it’s need­ed for dra­mat­ic pur­pos­es – gives the audi­ence the impres­sion that they con­trol, they can judge, and they can under­stand. I think, on the con­trary, I have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to my audi­ence to take them on a jour­ney that is also by them­selves, and show that you can­not always open all the cur­tains. There’s a labyrinth in our life, and there is a lim­i­ta­tion to our under­stand­ing. This film is about the desire to under­stand, but that there are lim­its to this understanding.

So how do you tri­umph over all of these lim­i­ta­tions and make a film?

I put myself at risk. I’m try­ing to push the bound­aries of film lan­guage as I feel the gram­mar of cin­e­ma has come to sort of con­ven­tion­alise a set of expres­sion. I’m chal­leng­ing that and I’m hop­ing to do so by mak­ing films like this. It’s always a chal­lenge for me as a film­mak­er and for my crew to bring about these visions in a very prac­ti­cal way. Also, on the lev­el of the thought, it’s always a ques­tion, it’s always a risk, it’s always the con­stant dance on the edge of the abyss.

What do you mean in prac­ti­cal real terms by danc­ing on the edge of the abyss?

You don’t know whether you can, as a film­mak­er, suc­ceed in mak­ing a film that’s so much about the labyrinth and the frailty of our per­cep­tion. It’s about the labyrinth of the human mind and in this case this young girl, who seems to be extreme­ly inno­cent and frag­ile but it’s a jour­ney to her. It’s this kind of film­mak­ing that doesn’t do cov­er­age. We actu­al­ly have chore­o­graphed shots that can last for a minute, for two min­utes that have a begin­ning, mid­dle and an end more-or-less.

I don’t do cov­er­age real­ly so it’s not in the edit­ing phase that I invent my movies. I invent it before, and on the set, it’s more of a con­cep­tu­al work at the begin­ning. I think in movie-mak­ing its impor­tant to take the deci­sions before­hand and not push them back to the edit­ing room. That’s a dif­fer­ent kind of work, and I think that my way of work­ing is real­ly push­ing myself to the lim­its of the feasible.

Does that mean that the edit­ing stage is real­ly quick?

It’s not quick, but it’s quick­er than what peo­ple nowa­days are used to, because nowa­days more and more peo­ple are shoot­ing on dig­i­tal. They have hun­dreds of hours of mate­r­i­al. and that’s actu­al­ly, for me, more of an edit­ing job. I think that film­mak­ers should force them­selves to take deci­sions before and not keep­ing those to afterwards.

You seem at odds with a lot of trends.

Yes. I don’t do it just to be a rebel, I do it because I feel that’s what’s right and that’s what the audi­ence deserves, it’s to not to be kept in their com­fort zone, but to be chal­lenged because I think that’s how you bring mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences to the audience.

Which film­mak­ers have brought mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences to you?

A lot in film his­to­ry. Fifty years ago, it wouldn’t have been a ques­tion that dif­fer­ent direc­tors have very dif­fer­ent styl­is­tic and direc­to­r­i­al points-of-view and their direct­ing of the actors should not be the same. What we have today is more of a stan­dard­ised approach, even the for­mat now is almost exclu­sive­ly widescreen with­out rea­sons for that. In the past I can talk about Anto­nioni for exam­ple who real­ly tries to leave a place for the view­ers to immerse them­selves in the expe­ri­ences that he cre­ates. He doesn’t have to explain every­thing and he takes risks with the sto­ry­telling because he knows that that’s how you push, how you chal­lenge the viewer.

Have you any par­tic­u­lar favourites by Antonioni?

I like L’Avventura, I like all of his films basi­cal­ly. For exam­ple Blow-Up is some­thing that I real­ly feel close to, or even The Pas­sen­ger. I think I could talk about all of them. Or L’Eclisse – I guess those are my favourites.

At what age did you realise what your guid­ing inter­ests were and what helped you to be where you are today?

That’s a dif­fi­cult ques­tion, I don’t real­ly know how to answer it. I mean, dif­fer­ent impres­sions of arts, from paint­ing to films to pho­tog­ra­phers – a lot of dif­fer­ent impres­sions that I car­ry with me, or lit­er­a­ture. I’m inter­est­ed in worlds that have a very real feel but at the same time the over­all expe­ri­ence can cre­ate a fairy­tale impres­sion in your mind, like in Kafka’s books, or mag­i­cal real­ism. I like when it’s very real but has an over­all feel­ing of a sub­jec­tive experience.

Do you have any par­tic­u­lar hopes for your films once they’re fin­ished and peo­ple are watch­ing them?

Just that peo­ple should have less pre­con­cep­tions about movies. The inter­net pre­pares them for imme­di­ate knowl­edge, of a set of pre­con­cep­tions and pre-exist­ing thoughts and atti­tudes – almost like a very short descrip­tion of some­thing that should make sense. I real­ly hope that we can come back to a more human, mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ence and let go of the spi­ral of com­put­ers, and data and impres­sions and super­fi­cial imagery that’s con­stant­ly keep­ing us in a state of frus­tra­tion. I just want the view­er to sit back and maybe for­get… for­get their phones.

Sun­set is released 31 May. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.